For $10 an hour, Jessica Cole will swallow a sleeping pill, curl up in a crowded room and let random strangers watch her sleep.

For $800 a month, Amy F. will pump milk from her breasts and sell it to a mix of parents, fanatics and fetishists over the Internet.

For $10,000, Carrie Bloedorn will allow doctors to harvest her eggs—for the eighth time—and pass them to an infertile couple.

And for $23,000, Jessie Cook will consent to having another woman’s twin babies grow in her uterus for nine months.

These women don’t know one another, but in a shattered economy, they have something in common: They all need money, and they’re all willing to use their body to get it.

With the unemployment rate the highest in a generation—one in eight single moms is jobless, for instance—Americans have had to find creative ways to pay their bills. Women are feeling the strain because they make less on average and have less savings to tap into, says Nancy Folbre, Ph.D., professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Some research centers report jumps of as much as 50 percent in the number of healthy people willing to be medical guinea pigs. One Connecticut medical school reports increased interest in gynecological “modeling,” a job that pays roughly $200 for two hours mostly spent spread-eagle in stirrups while med students practice pelvic exams. A sleep clinic in Boston pays people willing to live for 28 days without windows, clocks, computers or contact with the outside world up to $5,000.

If selling one’s body for sex is the world’s oldest profession, then the reality of American economics circa 2010 has created its newest profession—selling one’s body for everything but sex. Should we worry when a woman’s body parts become nearly as valuable as the work she can do with her hands and mind? “We as a society have not figured out which parts of our body or self a person can sell. There’s a broad gray area of ethics and commerce where we are not comfortable,” says economist Debora L. Spar, Ph.D., president of Barnard College in New York City and author of The Baby Business (Harvard Business Press). “Whether it’s wombs, eggs, sperm, organs, genes or breast milk, we don’t have any sense of where to draw the line, except at prostitution.”

So is this a bold and exciting new world in which women are taking control of their financial situations? Or are their economic circumstances taking control of them? Even some of the women involved aren’t quite sure of the answer.

Black market breast milk

Amy F., a store manager in Indianapolis and mother of two, produces far more breast milk than her 14-month-old son, Jonas, can consume—as much as 56 quarts a month, so much she can barely fit anything else in her freezer. So, she figures, “why shouldn’t I make money from something that will otherwise go down the drain?”

Amy needs the money. When her husband, Brian, lost his primary job a few years back, the family spent time without health insurance. As a result, bills piled up after the birth of their 3-year-old daughter, Hannah, and after a staph infection landed Amy in the hospital twice. Brian is working full-time again, but “he had so little work for so long that the credit card debt really built up,” to as much as $30,000, Amy says. Even with new insurance, Amy had to shell out $800 for a scan of her shoulder and about $6,000 to treat Jonas’s chronic ear infections. “Every time we were about to get caught up, there was another setback,” she says.

Amy learned about the notion of selling breast milk from a college friend whose mother’s job as a wet nurse paid her tuition. It sounds like something out of the Victorian era, but with publicity surrounding the benefits of nursing, the breast milk market is booming. At least one Los Angeles staffing agency openly matches new moms with wet nurses. Nonprofit and for-profit milk banks across the country provide donated milk for a fee to parents who want to breast-feed but cannot, as when women have a medical condition that prevents nursing. And with the economic downturn, “we’re getting a lot of calls from women who ask how much we will pay them for their milk,” says Pauline Sakamoto, R.N., executive director of the Mothers’ Milk Bank in San Jose, California. “We explain that it’s a volunteer process.”

Because going through official channels doesn’t pay, some moms with milk to spare have struck out on their own; all Amy had to do to get started was Google “Breast Milk for Sale.” She advertises on Sell.com and TruckAndBarter.com, reaping $400 to $800 a month from customers in New York, Oregon, Texas, Florida and the Carolinas. She ships her bounty via overnight mail or Greyhound bus delivery, sending out four coolers packed with about 22 bags of milk (6 ounces each) every week. For an extra $12, she will line the package with dry ice.

Amy provides milk for free to one client, a man whose wife died in childbirth and whose baby is allergic to formula. But as it turns out, “only two customers actually have a baby,” she says. “Three are men who like the taste, and the rest are fetishists who pour milk on their partners during sex. Some guys spend their money on beer; these guys spend it on milk. I would feel bad charging [the widower]. But I don’t mind getting money from the weirdos.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, recommends that people buy breast milk through licensed banks. These banks charge $3 to $5 an ounce, about 10 times what Amy asks, but the fee goes to testing milk for bacteria and certain viruses and later pasteurizing it. Banks typically screen donors using an eight-page medical questionnaire and a blood test for HIV and hepatitis. “Individuals who would not have passed our screening are selling their milk,” says Sakamoto, also president of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America in Raleigh, North Carolina. “A healthy child might be able to handle bad bacteria, but not one who is immuno-compromised.” These risks have prompted a few states, including New York, to require that people buy or sell breast milk only through licensed providers. That means Amy and her New York clients are breaking the law.

For nonprofit milk banks, paying donors would raise the price for people in need, as insurance usually does not cover milk, Sakamoto argues. “There is potential for fraud when you pay someone directly,” she adds. “Her milk could be mixed with a neighbor’s milk, cow’s milk or water. It could be old or not stored properly. Any of these scenarios could compromise a baby’s health.” (Amy won’t sell milk expressed while she is on antibiotics, or if she’s had alcohol the night before. She alerts customers when she is sick so they can opt out.)

Amy won’t close up shop until her milk supply dries up, which could be in two years or more. She’s used her milk money for supplies such as diapers and payments on her car and her husband’s student loans. At this rate, she will make $5,000 to $10,000 for every year of sales—enough, she says, to start saving for her children’s college. “I want to do that for my kids,” she says. “I don’t want them to be in the same situation my husband and I are in.”

Carrying a stranger’s children

Hopeful parents once had to wait at least six months to find a woman willing to be their surrogate. Today, for the first time since the practice began three decades ago, there’s no line. “Because of the economy, we are seeing more women than ever,” says Fay Johnson, program coordinator for Creating Families, a surrogacy agency in Encino, California.

Jessie Cook, a 25-year-old military contractor and married mother of two in Mobile, Alabama, is due to deliver twins this summer—the biological children of a couple she met online, parents who have been trying for more than a decade to have a second child. Cook, who was implanted with the couple’s embryo using in vitro fertilization (IVF), set her fee at $18,000, a price she says she could accept without feeling “like I was trying to sell their child back to them.” The couple will also pay Cook an extra $5,000 for having twins, compensate her for missed work and provide $500 in maternity clothes after Cook completes her first trimester.

Although Cook and her husband, Jeremy, a mechanic, work steadily, the family owes thousands of dollars in credit card debt and car loans. And when a family member ran into hard times during the real estate crash, Cook helped out. Still, she insists her initial motivation wasn’t money. Two years ago, a pregnant pal who had suffered repeated miscarriages asked her to act as a surrogate if her pregnancy failed. It didn’t, but the idea stuck in Cook’s mind. “My children are the best thing in the world to me,” Cook says about her sons, Andrew, 8, and Chance, 2. “I can’t imagine not being able to have kids. Surrogacy is a kind of calling for me. I’m doing this to change someone’s life.”

Surrogacy carries the same risks as any other pregnancy: Women can develop high blood pressure or gestational diabetes and, if the baby is delivered by caesarean section, infection or bleeding, according to the March of Dimes in White Plains, New York. Depression is common; one in eight pregnant women and new moms suffers from it. And childbirth is fatal for about one in 10,000. A surrogate’s risk for complication is higher than for most pregnant women because IVF raises the odds of conceiving multiples—as Cook did. Prospective parents and surrogates often choose selective reduction if more than two babies are conceived, but Cook is firmly against abortion, meaning she took on even more risk than usual. Still, Cook says, “I’m not worried. I have the gift of carrying a child very easily.”

Because women’s pregnancy experiences vary so much, the balance of physical risks with emotional and financial rewards can be tough for many surrogate mothers to gauge, Johnson says. “For the more altruistic woman, the payoff is the child, regardless of the economy,” she says. “But when women do it just for the money and something unexpected happens—multiples, complications, bed rest—she never feels she is getting enough.”

The eight-time egg donor

Two and a half years ago, Carrie Bloedorn, 31, retired from her career as a “serial egg donor.” A stay-at-home mom in Atlanta, she had donated seven times, nearly “back to back to back,” keeping her on fertility medications for more than three years at a stretch. The extra money, from $4,000 to $15,000 per donation, had been a nice perk, funneled into a minivan down payment, college accounts for her 6-year-old twins and start-up costs for her long-term dream of opening her own egg-donation agency. But she knew she had already donated more times than doctors recommend. Seven times, in a process similar to that of IVF, she had injected hormones into her stomach, prompting her ovaries to produce multiple eggs, then undergone egg retrieval, during which doctors insert a needle into the ovary via the vagina. “In my mind, I was done,” she says. The cratered economy changed that calculation.

Last winter, Bloedorn’s husband, Eric, was selling medical devices for a fledgling company, and sales were at a standstill. Bloedorn herself estimates she lost about $8,000 trying to launch her agency, draining her business bank account and ringing up charges on a credit card that doubled its interest rates. “It became obvious to me that the economy was a bigger factor than I realized,” she says. “I started getting scared.” After cutting back every other way she could, she was forced to rethink the decision she’d made earlier: She reenlisted to be an egg donor, asking a fee of $10,000. “I was desperate,” she says. “How long would it take me to make $10,000 at a part-time job?”

“Over the past few months, we have seen donor applicants go from an average of 13 a day to 40,” says Andrew Vorzimer, an attorney and CEO of Egg Donation, the agency in Encino where Bloedorn enrolled. “We’re hearing from an extraordinary number of working moms who would have never considered it before and college-age women begging to be accepted because they can no longer get student loans.” Unemployed women are also offering up eggs, reports Robin von Halle, president of Alternative Reproductive Resources in Chicago. “We’re finding more professional women who wouldn’t have had the time had they not lost their jobs,” she says.

Bloedorn first donated about five years ago, on the suggestion of a family member whose best friend worked at a fertility clinic. She says she’s never thought much about the children she’s helped to create, even after seeing photos of kids who her share her DNA. “I’m not attached to my genetics, I guess,” she says. “I don’t know the man [involved]. I don’t love that man. I gave away an egg that had a chance of becoming an embryo, but I didn’t carry it, and it doesn’t feel emotional to me. Now that I’ve met some of the recipients, I understand how difficult their journey was. I am proud of my decisions, because they provided a gift to others while helping my children have better lives.”

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama, warns against donating eggs more than six times, chiefly to reduce the chance for half-siblings inadvertently dating but also to minimize medical risks to the donor, says Glenn Schattman, M.D., chairman of the Practice Committee of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, an ASRM affiliate. Donors risk ovarian hyperstimulation, a condition that in extreme cases can lead to kidney failure as well as infections caused by egg retrieval. Possible links between fertility meds and ovarian cancer have long been debated; in 2009, BMJ published a study of more than 54,000 Danish women that found no convincing association. Still, “six times is enough,” Dr. Schattman says. “Just because a person wants to take the risk doesn’t mean that medically we should let her.” Lyne Macklin-Fife, program administrator at Egg Donation, agrees—in theory. “So many cycles should shut the door on [Bloedorn],” she says. “But she’s in dire need. The money is too good for her not to do it.”

Bloedorn remains ambivalent about her decision to advertise her eggs. Since her lowest point, her husband has found a better-paying job, and she has recouped all but $2,000 of her business losses and launched her agency, Eggspecting. But Eric has also enrolled in an MBA program, and this May, $60,000 in student loans will start to come due. As an egg broker, “I’d never accept a donor who has done it more than six times,” Bloedorn says. “I go back and forth, willing and unwilling, and think, What if it does something to my body? I’ve been lucky. Then again, what’s one more?”

Cash for napping in public

On the surface, literally, Jessica Cole has it all. Size 34B breasts. A perfect size 6 body. As a “fit model,” whose body fashion designers use to create patterns, the 27-year-old in Brooklyn, New York, turned her corporeal flawlessness into cash. In her best month, she earned $3,500—not bad for a recent college grad trying to get by before beginning graduate school for anthropology. Then “the recession hit, and business dried up—I couldn’t get any more work,” she says.

One day last winter, a friend turned her on to a new way to use her body for bucks: An ad on CraigsList.org headlined “Come and sleep at the new museum.” The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City wanted women ages 18 to 40 to arrive around noon, put on a cotton nightie, pop a sleeping aid if they chose, slip into a bed in the exhibition space and sleep until closing time. “The friend who forwarded me the ad said he wished he could do it,” Cole says. “But they wanted only women.”

“This is XX,” by Chinese artist Chu Yun, aspired to create “a living sculpture through sleep,” read the accompanying wall text. “The participants…are less real-life, modern-day Sleeping Beauties than islands of enviable calm.… There is an inherent irony in the participants’ supernatural tranquility: That they are only able to maintain their state of sleep with the assistance of sleeping aids, suggests that, perhaps, their state is not one of relaxation, but of withdrawal and extreme vulnerability.”

Hundreds of women applied, says assistant curator Jarrett Gregory, including a narcoleptic and someone feeling catatonic after a recent breakup. For her two-month stint, Cole dozed for dollars three days a week, earning a total of about $800. She says taking a pill didn’t faze her, “because I used an over-the-counter pill and not a prescription.” That sense of security may be misplaced, warns Donna Arand, Ph.D., clinical director of the Kettering & Sycamore Sleep Center in Kettering, Ohio. “Over-the-counter drugs aren’t necessarily safer,” she says. “Interactions with other drugs and supplements can occur with OTC sleep aids, and they can contribute to heart or breathing problems.”

In her rare moments of wakefulness, Cole enjoyed measuring her audience’s response. On her first day, a woman with a foreign accent wondered aloud if Cole was real, then decided she wasn’t: “She said my hair was obviously a wig and that my veins were really badly painted on my arms.” Later, a man lifted the pillow Cole had put over her eyes to block out light. “I screamed at him, ‘You can’t touch art!'” she says. “The service I provided with my body in that bed did not involve touching. Then it becomes prostitution.”